News about contemporary American writer of Ageless Soul, Care of the Soul, A Religion of One's Own, and the Gospel series.

Thursday, July 07, 2016

The soul "expands another orbit on the great deep"

Thomas Moore writes "Circling" for his Soul & Spirit blog at Patheos in which he talks about Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Circles (1841).

Moore writes, "We live in circles, even if we prefer the illusion that we are a series of straight lines. Evolution, personal and social, is a stone falling into a still lake. Sometimes the circle feels as if we are chasing our tail, what the old magus called uroboros, the snake that eats its tail. It’s frustrating because, believers in straight lines, we think we’re getting nowhere. But read Emerson’s essay. Circling is the path to self-discovery."

Moore shares:

"I also remember my dear friend James Hillman who always recommended staying with or in the circumstances that are difficult, instead of trying to find a way out of them. He didn’t mean to surrender or succumb but to find a way through life’s challenge. Then you are not escaping or denying or avoiding.

Often, when I mention the beauty of circling, someone will say, “I’m all right with spirals.” Well, of course. Spirals get you somewhere. They are straight lines with circles around them. But they are not circles."

Moore states, "The feeling of being stuck and going around in a circle may be maddening but it’s the perfect preparation for the kind of advancement that Emerson describes. All right, it’s not really advancement and yet it is a positive development." This positive development is transformation.

"The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring
imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger
circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of
circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of
the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each thought, having
formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance, as for instance an
empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite, to heap itself
on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is
quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands
another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave,
with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be
imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward
with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions." — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

Why Barque: Thomas Moore?

"What I'm trying to do is say lighten up and let life flow through you, and be on the waves as they go up and down. For me, a great image in mythology is
Tristan of Tristan and Isolde. He's out there on a little boat without an oar, without a rudder, on the Irish sea . . . You float your way. You drift. The essence
of my approach is to be extravagantly accepting and forgiving of yourself and others. Ride the waves and let life take
you where it has good things for you." - Thomas Moore